Purpose: Many have developed systems
for picking the winning team in a football game. For some, its a
matter of accounting for weather conditions, average weight of the offensive
line, yards let up per game, average first downs and millions of other
stat tidbits. For most its picking a favorite team or whatever team has
the better colors. This week, Scientific AmeriKen will examine several
of these methods under strict scientific scrutiny as we search for the
secret to making football picks.

Hypothesis: It is the hypothesis of this experiment
that because Las Vegas odds makers make a living off of setting the correct
odds in each football match that they will make the highest percentage
of football picks.

Equipment: Needed for this experiment
will be a pen and a pad of paper, a newspaper which can provide the latest
vegas odds and later a source to get scores, a coin, at least one other
person to get outside opinions.

Procedure: In this experiment, methods
tested are who
is wanted to win, the opinions of 3 other football watchers, vegas
line without factoring in point spread, and the coin used is a Susan B.
Anthony dollar ("Betsy"). The first step is to determine all the
football match ups in a particular week and write each down, then gather
everybodys' picks before the start of the first game. At the end of the
week, calculate everybodys' pick percentage and compare.

Conclusion: Based on the raw data, it would
appear that the hypothesis was proven correct and vegas squeaked out with
the best record. It would seem as though putting any effort into the picking
of the winner is merely a waste of time as in the best case of Vegas only
added an extra 11% of picking efficiency over the flip of a coin. In fact, as a group, picking of the right team occured 56.8% of the
time, seeing as this is only 6.8% higher the 50%, it would seem that there
is in fact no logic in picking football winners.